Realisation
by Revhead
Summary: Jack tries for years to drown out his memories and emotions. It takes the events of "Lost City" for him to make an important realisation.


**Realisation**

There was one major downside to being a soldier in the Special Forces. Actually, there were several. The training was brutal, you got assigned to the worst missions, you saw and experienced unbelievable horrors, you lost friends and comrades on a regular basis, you hardly ever got to spend time with your family and you never knew for certain if you were going to make it back home alive. But there was one thing that kept coming back to haunt Jack O'Neill, not the least because it made everything else even worse.

Ever since Special Ops training, Jack couldn't get drunk – no matter how hard he tried.

At the time, it had sounded pretty sweet. Building up an immunity to alcohol had its advantages. It meant he could drink, but still keep his wits about him – which was important since he had a lot of classified stored away in his mind that he couldn't afford to blurt out accidentally. It also meant that when he was on a covert undercover mission he could drink and pretend to be intoxicated while in actual fact he was totally sober and thus able to complete his task effectively.

It wasn't until a number of years later that the full implications of his near-unbreakable sobriety hit him.

A mission went bad, and he lost a buddy to a sniper's bullet. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a teammate die, but it was the first time it had been a close friend. Only the weekend before, Jack and his wife Sara had been to a barbeque at John and Barbara's place. Then suddenly John was dead, and Jack had to break the news to his widow. Barbara had cried for hours. Jack had tried to get drunk – to drown out the guilt and horror and anguish and grief – but he couldn't, and the knowledge that the numb feeling he so craved was denied to him made him angry. The next few missions he went on, Jack killed every enemy he came across by hand in order to vent his rage.

He had a lot of memories that he wanted to forget. But four months in a filthy, rotting hellhole of an Iraqi prison supplied him with more than he could handle. He was left behind by a man he thought he could trust, watching in horror as the helicopter took off without him, knowing that with the hit he'd taken there was no way he was going to be able to escape capture. He thought he knew what was coming, but the torture and appalling conditions he was subjected to were far worse than he could ever have imagined. It seemed to go on forever, and there was no rescue. Eventually, the Iraqi's tortured him to within an inch of his life and discarded him, bored with their toy, believing he wouldn't survive the night. But somehow he did, and he managed to make it back home. Once again, he tried to drown the memories and discovered that he couldn't. He almost killed himself then and there, unable to cope on his own. But Sara steadfastly refused to let him go. He hated himself for his weakness, even as he clung to her like a lifeline. She eased him through the long recovery, the nightmares and the flashbacks. She saved his life.

And then Charlie died. He was only ten years old, and he accidentally shot himself with Jack's personal gun. It rent Jack's heart in two, and this time he knew that he deserved to die. He didn't want Sara to drag him out of the pit of his despair, and she was so angry with him that she didn't even try. In the days leading up to the funeral, Jack drank endlessly, moving from bar to bar, trying to find oblivion in the bottom of a bottle, but it still eluded him. The day after, he took refuge in Charlie's bedroom, and prepared to kill himself with the same gun that had stolen the life of his son. He was interrupted, and given a chance to commit suicide with a last, heroic act to save the country – possibly even the planet. Against all odds, a geeky scientist and a courageous teenage kid on a planet light-years from Earth gave him a new will to live. He returned home a different man.

Unfortunately, it was a transformation that came too late to save his marriage. Sara was gone. On the kitchen table he found the divorce papers she'd left for him on the off chance that he would come back alive, alongside a slab of beer and the gun that she must have found under Charlie's pillow. It very nearly crushed him, but he kept an image of Skaara fixed in his mind and dismantled the weapon, burying it in the garden. The beers weren't any help during the final stages of the divorce as Sara refused to speak with him and he lost the house, but he drank them anyway. Gazing through his telescope up at the stars reminded him that somewhere out there the people of Abydos were living in freedom because of what he'd done. It didn't erase the guilt he felt about Charlie's death, but it was enough to help him live with himself.

It was a few years before the rug was pulled from under his feet and he tumbled into darkness again. In the time he spent at the SGC, he certainly went through some rough patches, but he never realised that Daniel was the one keeping him grounded until Daniel died. Ascended, whatever. It wasn't sudden but, unlike the other times that the younger man had been killed, it was, for all intents and purposes, permanent. Jack fell back on old habits, drinking heavily in the hopes that maybe this time the alcohol would work. But it didn't. It was a stark reminder that Jack was a Special Ops soldier, trained not to feel the effects of alcohol, trained not to feel anything. So he re-built the walls around his heart that Daniel had spent so many years trying to tear down. _This is the job,_ he told himself. _We lose people all the time. _

Jack had been so sure that nothing could possibly be worse than his stint in Iraq. Turned out he was dead wrong. Dead being the operative word. The Iraqi's had been held back somewhat by their desire to prolong the pain and keep him alive for as long as possible. After all, if he died their fun would have ended. Ba'al didn't have that problem, and Jack paid the price. Again. And again. And again. He lost track of how many times he died and was brought back to life, of all the ways the Goa'uld had come up with to kill him, each more painful than the last. Even glowing-octopus Daniel struggled to keep Jack sane throughout the ordeal. Afterwards, the recovery had been long and agonising. It was one thing to remember pain and torture, it was quite another to remember dying over and over in vivid detail. His usual ability to slam a lid on the memories failed him, and as usual he couldn't drown them either. His friends rallied around him, doing what they could to help, but ultimately it got so bad that Daniel visited again. He went against the rules and interfered. Jack didn't know what he did exactly, but any time that his thoughts or dreams strayed towards Ba'al's fortress his mind was suffused with a warm, white, comforting haze. Daniel saved him.

But the walls were still there. Daniel descended, and Jack was glad, but he struggled to express it. He couldn't connect with him the same way that he had before. And he couldn't find a way to thank Daniel for saving him, especially since the younger man didn't remember. So he tried to go on as normal, but there was a distance between them that he couldn't seem to breach, and inside he was floundering.

Jack had always been a man of actions, not words. And the opportunity presented itself for Jack to act; to finally say thank you without the words passing his lips. Daniel tried to take the download from the Ancients' repository, and save the world at the cost of his own life, but Jack didn't let him. He couldn't lose Daniel again, so in a way it was selfish. But Jack saw how important this mission was to the younger man, and so he went that one step further. He let the head-grabber thing grab his head and fill it with knowledge that would overwrite his mind and then eventually kill him. Because someone had to do it, but that someone couldn't be Daniel.

That weekend, Jack drank. He didn't regret what he had done, but at the same time he didn't want to die. Daniel had given him a will to live, and yet in doing so he'd also given him a friend who he was willing to die for. Jack had made the choice to save his friend's life, and he knew the consequences. That weekend, he allowed himself some time to grieve for his own death, because on Monday he knew that he would go back to work and do his best to save the planet again. He drank, and drank, not eating, trying the theory that alcohol was more effective on an empty stomach. He wanted to forget that he only had days to live, that his entire existence was going to be erased, bit by agonising bit.

But his unfaltering sobriety refused to succumb.

And Jack felt sorry for himself. Once, just once, he wanted to drown his emotions. Was a weekend of alcohol-induced bliss too much to ask for? Apparently so, but it wasn't fair. Everyone had problems, he knew, but few were denied the comfort that he was. They could get drunk, forget their sorrows, and have a good time, but he couldn't. It wasn't fair.

And he thought, maybe just maybe the download would be welcome. He couldn't remember what it was like to be drunk, but he had seen enough people drink themselves into oblivion. Maybe this would be similar. The information would seep into his brain; take control of his words and his actions. He wouldn't be himself anymore. And that meant he wouldn't be able to feel. He would get the chance to be numb, just once, before he died. The thought was almost a comfort.

Except, when it all started, Jack realised that for all these years he'd had it wrong.

The takeover was faster this time. Accelerated, because of the urgency of their situation. The download didn't have time to be gentle if it was going to save Earth in time. It shoved him back, making room for itself. It tried to overwrite everything that was important to him, and Jack realised.

He couldn't stop what this download was doing to him. He was dying, but it was so much worse than that. Because all these years, he'd done his best to drown out or repress or deny what he felt, and only now did he realise how important his emotions were to him. Yes, sometimes they hurt; the pain, and grief, and anger, and guilt, and remorse, and loneliness, and fear, and shame... But they were what made him human, made him strong. And even though he'd experienced these emotions too many times to count, over the years he had also experienced happiness, and joy, and hope, and awe, and love, and friendship. And they were what made life worth living. They made everything else worth it. And he was losing them.

Carter, Teal'c, and Daniel all talked to him. He could hear them, barely, over the cogs whirring around in his brain, piecing necessary bits of information together – outpost, lost in fire, need to go faster, get the power source, find the outpost on Earth, power the weapons, destroy Anubis – and he knew that what they were saying was important. To him, as well as to them. They were reaching out to him, expressing their emotions, because he was dying and they had all waited until it was almost too late to say what they had needed and wanted to for ages. The download wanted to ignore them, because they were distracting him from the task at hand. It tried to drown his emotions, just as he had tried so many times before, to keep him focused.

But drowning his emotions wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and Jack realised that now. He refused to let it happen. The download could destroy everything else, but his emotions he would keep until the end. He owed that to his friends. They needed him to hear them, and they needed to hear him back. He couldn't speak English anymore, but Jack had always been a man of actions, not words.

It was a constant battle against the download, but he fought as hard as he could, for his team. They needed to know how much he loved them, how much he appreciated them, how much their relationships meant to him, how much of an honour it had been to serve with them. They needed to hear all the thank-you's that he had never said for everything they had done for him. They needed to understand that he knew they would have done the same for him, but that he could never have let any of them die in his place. They needed to see that he was okay with this, and glad that his last act would be saving the world, but even more importantly, saving them.

He didn't know for sure, but he thought that they heard him.

He mourned for all the years he had wasted, but he was glad that he had realised in the end, realised in time to feel and expressed what he should have all along.

And in the midst of destroying the Goa'uld fleet, the download noticed the strong emotions of its vessel. It noticed the deep connections with his teammates. It noticed that he wasn't afraid to die, but it noticed that he didn't want to.

So it gave him a way out.

This outpost wasn't equipped to remove it and save his life, but it could suspend him. The saving of his life would be up to his teammates. But the download knew that they would do everything they could, because the vessel knew.

And just in case they were unable to save him, the download gave him one last thing.

The chance to say goodbye.


End file.
